Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
12 New Faces
13 The Divide Widens
14 A Bit of Psychology, A Bit of Humour and Who the F**k are Man United Anyway?
15 Celebrity Status
16 Like Clockwork
17 All Mouth an’ no Trousers
18 We’re on the Telly!
19 When the Lights Went Out
20 One Team in Bristol
21 From Miami to Philly, Via Sheffield
22 A Momentary Respite and a Musical Interlude
23 Back in the Old Routine
24 Changin’ Times
25 The Temperature Rises and the Bomb Drops
26 Dark Days, Darker Deeds and a Savaging by Sheep
27 Doing Something Outrageous
28 Do Anything You Wanna Do
29 No Fun
30 A Day to Remember
31 No Let-Up
32 Saints and Sinners
33 A Battering at the Bell
34 Notes from a Big Country
35 Working-class Heroes
36 Bridewell Blues
37 The Melting Pot Boils Over
38 The End of an Era
Copyright
INTRODUCTION Never Mind the Bollocks
It looks like the bookshops of Britain had a bit of a problem with the classification of Bovver – should it sit alongside the plethora of ‘hoolie lit’ that has adorned the shelves over the last few years, next to the impressive eponymous Cass; the classic, granddaddy of them all, Steaming In, by Colin Ward; the scary Scally by Andy Nicholls; or the frankly embarrassing Inside the Forest by Gary ‘Boatsy’ Clarke? Or maybe it should be classed as an autobiography, right next to Beckham’s, as I have seen in Waterstones? Then again, I’ve also seen it under ‘Real Crimes’, nestling cosily between Happy Like Murderers: The True Story of Fred and Rose West by Gordon Burns and Real Hard Cases: True Crime from the Streets by Les Brown. David Beckham and Fred West – not quite exalted company, but interesting dinner-party guests nonetheless. Well, one of them at least.
Of course, many Bristol City fans have said that it should be found under ‘Fiction’ – they’re entitled to their opinion. Mind you, so is the bloke I see wandering around the city centre in his underpants holding a flagon of White Lightning who claims the world is flat.
An anonymous Sunderland fan wrote: ‘If you love the wannabe hoolie fantasy life then don’t buy it. If you want a bit of reality then have a read,’ while John King of Football Factory fame called it ‘Social history with steel toe-caps…’, which, to me, not only encapsulated what my book was all about but also conveniently classified it better than I – or Britain’s bookshops, for that matter – ever could. It will be interesting to see where Waterstones place Booted and Suited. I can promise one thing though – it won’t be under ‘Fairy Stories’.
When I wrote the original book some ten years ago, the ‘hoolie lit’ genre was in its infancy. I never envisaged that, in later years, Britain’s academia would not only be studying books such as mine but actually making a career out of it (and being paid to do so in part with Government grants), all supposedly to determine just what makes football hooligans tick. Steve Redhead, Professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the University of Brighton, who also dubbed the books ‘hit and tell’ stories, offers up the following in his article ‘Terrace Terrors? Post-Subcultural Criminology and the Rise and Fall of Football Hooligan Subcultures’, which may not explain why hoolies act as they do but certainly explains why the academics are fascinated by the subject: ‘The methodological work which is being undertaken is a study of the simulacrum of hooliganism, which includes the strange “pulp faction” of football hooligan literature. The study of football hooligan literature, it is argued, might eventually lead us to better, more informed ethnographies of football hooligan subcultures.’
Confused? Me too. Didn’t understand a bloody word of it. Which brings me back to the fairy stories. Professor Redhead even delves into the world of homo-eroticism that is allegedly apparent in the genre: ‘The football hooligan memoir authors’ interest in the male violence and male bonding of what were once labelled in pulp fiction “terrace terrors” is wrapped up in an almost “camp” fascination with hardness in male youth culture… the link between gay and skinhead subcultures is certainly worth reconsidering.’
Really? Not with the skinheads I know it isn’t, but then again I’m not a scholar – and I don’t live in Brighton. I’m just wondering who’s getting the hard-on over these books – the lads who read and write them or the academics who study them. For less of the psychobabble and a more concise reason as to why British males indulge in hooligan activities, I’ll offer some of my own thoughts later in the book.
In the Introduction to the original book, I mentioned something about regret. Like the late, great Frank, I had one or two – regrets about actions from my formative years, that sort of thing, but it’s often been said that you should only have regrets about what you haven’t done, not about what you have done. So, yes, there are a few regrets, like not delving deeper into the Bristol music scene and not giving Northern Soul the recognition it deserves, which I’ve endeavoured to put right in this new edition, but the biggest regret I’ve got is that I wasn’t born just a couple of years earlier – ‘I was 14 in January 1970, a perfect age for a perfect era…’ Well, not quite, maybe 16 would have done it; 18, and it would have been a totally different story.
I had touched upon the late Sixties in the first edition, but because Bovver was autobiographical I only wanted to write about my first-hand experiences, my memories, my recollections, my thoughts on the world around me in 1970s Britain. ‘Welcome to the real 1970s – it ain’t no boogie wonderland…’ proclaimed the cover. To write about this earlier period, I would need to draw upon the experiences of my elders, my betters, those more knowledgeable than me – after all, I was still into Chopper bikes, climbing trees and Jubblies in 1968 – and so this new edition now also includes a prequel which attempts to throw more light on Britain just before the 1970s, an intense few years that witnessed man walking on the moon, student riots, Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the metamorphosis of the quintessential and very acceptable British youth cult of the mod (clean living under difficult circumstances) to the birth of the most misunderstood and vilified – the skinheads (no one likes us and we don’t care).
As well as exploring this earlier period, I’ve also expanded on other areas which I think I sadly neglected in the original – the contribution of black DJs to the Bristol funk scene and how the shift from funk to punk was not such a quantum leap as it at first seems. It was a shift which was to have far-reaching consequences in future years, something which I guess at the time I was completely oblivious to, so there’s as much Seymour and the Pop Group as The Specials and Paul Weller – a good trade-up, I think.
In the summer of 2004, I was approached by Radio